Danton’s Death, National Theatre, NT Olivier, August 2010

This play by Georg Büchner deals with a two-week period during the terror following the French revolution. The events he describes were but forty years in the past, and Büchner knew many of the speeches by Robespierre and Danton by heart. He was born in 1813, the same year as Wagner, so both these brilliant artists were at a very impressionable age when the 1830 revolution in France brought the ‘citizen king’ Louis-Philippe to power, and both became young revolutionaries. But while Wagner lived to create great operas, Büchner died at 23. This play was written in 1835 when he was just 21.

Robespierre and Danton, photo by Johan Persson

The main characters are Danton, Robespierre and Saint-Just. In an interesting essay in the programme, Ruth Scurr writes that “Büchner presents a brilliant portrait of Robespierre as a cold-blooded hypocritical fanatical prig”. Does he? If so this production didn’t quite show it. Robespierre is a background figure in the second half of the play, and seems to show serious reservations about condemning Danton, while Saint-Just is the prime mover in getting him convicted and guillotined. In this sense I thought Alec Newman gave a strong performance of Saint-Just, while Elliot Levey gave Robespierre a wrather camp feel, as did Chu Omambala with Collot d’Herbois, but that was presumably the intention of director Michael Grandage. It did however create something of a Monty Python feel to the whole thing, except that it wasn’t funny. It was dull and unrelenting, and while Toby Stephens’ extremely emotive portrayal of Danton may have been convincing, it didn’t elicit my sympathy.

Saint-Just in public mode, photo by Johan Persson

Paule Constable’s lighting, and the music and sound by Adam Cork, were wonderful, as were Christopher Oram’s designs showing enormously tall doors and windows that made the revolutionaries look small. Robespierre’s remark that ‘Virtue must rule through terror’ is often repeated, and the play has plenty of youthful energy from its young cast, but feels a bit like a history lesson. It only had its first performance 65 years after its author’s death, and Büchner went on to write deeper things, particularly Woyzeck, which was later used by Alban Berg in his opera of that name. Of course it’s always worthwhile to recall the history of the French terror in the early 1790s, but if one wants to recreate a sense of idealism, and revolutionary energy run amok, Giordano’s opera Andrea Chenier is the thing to see — Covent Garden and the ENO please note.

The four acts of this play are performed without a break — lasting about an hour and three quarters — and near the beginning we hear Robespierre saying (in Howard Brenton’s new version), “Only by your own self-destruction can you fall” (German: Du kannst nur durch deine eigne Kraft fallen). Robespierre fell just a few months later, but at the end of this play it is Danton and his friends who go to the guillotine, and that final scene is a brilliant coup de theatre. Whether it’s worth waiting for, I’m not so sure.

Performances continue until October 14 — for more details click here.

Anne Boleyn, Globe Theatre, London, July 2010

This play has a wonderful role for the eponymous heroine, and Miranda Raison portrayed her superbly as an attractive, sexy, and determined young woman, more than a match for everyone at court except Thomas Cromwell. He — the man who engineered her downfall — was played here by John Dougall as sure-footed and ruthless, ready to abuse his power as he saw fit.

Miranda Raison as Anne Boleyn, photo by Manuel Harlan

The story is that he destroys Anne before she can warn the king about his maladministration of funds from the dissolution of the monasteries. But hadn’t the king tired of her? Didn’t he find Jane Seymour an attractive alternative to a wife who failed to produce a son? If so this play showed no attraction of the king towards Jane Seymour. She appeared only to be a tool of Cromwell, put in at the last minute, and the king’s affections for Anne never seemed to diminish. Yes, it may well be true that had Anne produced a son her position would have been impregnable, and yes this play did show that the birth of a deformed baby was an important factor, but it seemed as if the king’s role was subservient to that of Cromwell, which was odd. Did Anne really meet William Tyndale, during a journey he made secretly to England? In this play she met him twice, but the second meeting was unconvincing. Tyndale’s acolytes were very rude to her, yet she kept pleading with them. Surely a woman as shrewd as Anne, brought up with the intrigues of the French court, would have had little patience with deliberate insults, and backed out of an impossible situation.

Act I built up a steady momentum, and I liked Anne’s announcement of a fifteen minute intermission as she scuttled off to the bedroom with the king, but Act II suddenly transported us nearly seventy years into the future. All at once we were faced with James VI of Scotland, successor to Anne’s daughter Queen Elizabeth. And then the play switched unpredictably between past and future. History tells us that Anne was beheaded at the Tower of London, and some say that her ghost walks there still. Perhaps it does, but did James I of England see it, as he did in this play by Howard Brenton, directed by John Dove? At one level we seemed to be at a history lesson, but with so many laughs for the audience I could no longer to take it seriously.

James Garnon played a wittily serious James VI — he was after all a highly educated man whose intellect was often underrated — and Anthony Howell portrayed a virile and attractive Henry VIII. In the recent Globe production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey showed immense gravitas, before having the ground cut from under him by Anne Boleyn, but here Colin Hurley played him as an irascible weakling. Perhaps that was the intention, but the contrast between the two plays was ill judged, unless we are supposed to take them as fictions bearing little resemblance to history. I very much liked Sam Cox as Dean Lancelot Andrewes, and Peter Hamilton Dyer as William Tyndale, and I loved the costumes by Hilary Lewis. Anne’s dresses were glorious, and Miranda Raison’s smouldering sex appeal and assertive shrewdness in that role was by far the most vital thing about this play.